Gender Conjecture

[aesmael]

This is, of course, an unresearched lay idea. If someone can show me wrong I will merely be disappointed, not bitter. I am rather fond of David Brin's acronym - CITOKATE (Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error). It should not be needed to put up such disclaimers but sadly much of humanity is very irrational about its ideas (I on the other hand am merely slightly irrational).

I have been wondering if perhaps gender identity works rather like what little I have read of sexual orientation. That is, a small number of people who are exclusively identified with the sex assigned to them at birth (analogous to the small fraction of the population that is exclusively heterosexual), a small number of people exclusively identified with the opposite sex to that assigned them at birth (those transsexuals who insist from the time they can speak that they are really a boy/girl) and the majority of the population being bigendered to some degree but usually feeling a definite pull toward one (and possibly being somewhat malleable?).

Now I ought disclaim that I do not believe this scheme to be immutable truth, though I do hold the opinion it is of vaguely similar shape. I do not hold any of the categories outlined to be rigidly set and I freely confess to oversimplifying things by, forex, writing as if there were only two, clearly differentiated sexes. Nor does this scheme leave any obvious place for people are genderless (much as the model it is based upon leaves out asexual people) and it does seem to put androgynes and bigendered and genderqueer people in roughly the same place. I don't know if that is a feature or a bug.

I could propose new terms but we already have equivalents (homogendered would be cisgendered, heterogendered for transgendered) and anyway those terms irk me for reasons I do not care to go into at this precise moment (but ask in the comments if you like, it is free to make as many as you could want and there may even be answers later). This basic idea has probably been proposed, possibly even falsified before but if it has I didn't notice. Possibly it is like those mathematical formulations which are later shown to be equivalent.

Comments

[lost-angelwings.livejournal.com]

I think that you're right :O

But that sexuality is easier to deal with than gender identity.. sadly :(

I think I might be okay if there was more fluid acceptance... :| If doing the same things as a guy got the same reactions that I would if I was a girl :\ If being silly was met with "oh you're cute" rather than "shut up loser".

:(

When crying makes ppl feel bad for you rather than beat you up and laugh at you :(

*sigh*

I dunno ;-;

But I think you are right :)

[lantyssa.livejournal.com]

That is very much like they Kinsey (orientation) and Benjamin (gender) scales. They're faily simple and suffer from problems, but at a basic level they're useful for explaining concepts to people who think of them as binary.

When I really want to mess with people, I describe gender as being a three dimensional matrix instead of a continuum. We have different traits which can be masculine or feminine (of course which are debatable). These traits in aggregate determine our overall gender, which could still be somewhere between male and female.

[aesmael.livejournal.com]

Your third dimension intrigues me and I wish to learn more.

[lantyssa.livejournal.com]

Take various aspects of a personality: temperament, aggression, empathy, clothing preferences, body language, interest in sports, aptitudes, ad infinitum.

Any one of which society might rate as masculine or feminine on its own. Some may have a real basis in gender, some may not but are perceived as such. For simplicity I'll state they range from -1 (male), 0 (genderless), to 1 (female).

One could arrange these traits in either a two dimensional matrix with X columns and Y rows or a single row with all of length (X*Y). It would depend what the sorting criteria are but either works for the basic concept. That gives us a matrix of dimensions (X, Y, [-1 to 1]).

With all the traits rated from 1 to -1 in our matrix, a contour map could be created. It is unlikely anyone would fall completely on one side of zero, but most will have a predominate amount there. Effeminate men, butch women, and the genderqueer will have more cross-over and normalize closer to zero than someone closer to stereotypical gender roles.

In that way it is similar to the gender continuum, but gives more detail. Of course so much of gender is arbitrary that getting an objective mapping would be difficult. To my mind though it shows an appreciation of the nuances of gender better than a single line, at least in concept.

Did that make sense?